Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Curiously, Woolf herself was of questionable sartorial sensibility — so much so that even Vita noticed it from the midst of her infatuation, remarking on Virginia’s aesthetically atrocious choice of “woollen orange stockings [and] pumps.” But perhaps Woolf was simply more interested in the symbolic dimension of clothes than in the stylistic; more keen to explore that symbolism in her writing than in her wardrobe.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

With an eye to her protagonist’s fluid transition between the male and female genders — one that happened in the novel by magic rather than by medicine, for Woolf was writing two years before the first successful gender reassignment surgery was completed, decades before the term “transgender” was coined, and nearly half a century before Jan Morris’s trailblazing account of what it’s actually like to change bodily genders — Woolf considers the role of clothing as a vehicle of the transition and a signifier of the fluidity of identity:

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual — openness indeed was the soul of her nature — something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Curiously, Woolf herself was of questionable sartorial sensibility — so much so that even Vita noticed it from the midst of her infatuation, remarking on Virginia’s aesthetically atrocious choice of “woollen orange stockings [and] pumps.” But perhaps Woolf was simply more interested in the symbolic dimension of clothes than in the stylistic; more keen to explore that symbolism in her writing than in her wardrobe.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

With an eye to her protagonist’s fluid transition between the male and female genders — one that happened in the novel by magic rather than by medicine, for Woolf was writing two years before the first successful gender reassignment surgery was completed, decades before the term “transgender” was coined, and nearly half a century before Jan Morris’s trailblazing account of what it’s actually like to change bodily genders — Woolf considers the role of clothing as a vehicle of the transition and a signifier of the fluidity of identity:

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual — openness indeed was the soul of her nature — something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Curiously, Woolf herself was of questionable sartorial sensibility — so much so that even Vita noticed it from the midst of her infatuation, remarking on Virginia’s aesthetically atrocious choice of “woollen orange stockings [and] pumps.” But perhaps Woolf was simply more interested in the symbolic dimension of clothes than in the stylistic; more keen to explore that symbolism in her writing than in her wardrobe.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

With an eye to her protagonist’s fluid transition between the male and female genders — one that happened in the novel by magic rather than by medicine, for Woolf was writing two years before the first successful gender reassignment surgery was completed, decades before the term “transgender” was coined, and nearly half a century before Jan Morris’s trailblazing account of what it’s actually like to change bodily genders — Woolf considers the role of clothing as a vehicle of the transition and a signifier of the fluidity of identity:

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual — openness indeed was the soul of her nature — something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Curiously, Woolf herself was of questionable sartorial sensibility — so much so that even Vita noticed it from the midst of her infatuation, remarking on Virginia’s aesthetically atrocious choice of “woollen orange stockings [and] pumps.” But perhaps Woolf was simply more interested in the symbolic dimension of clothes than in the stylistic; more keen to explore that symbolism in her writing than in her wardrobe.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

With an eye to her protagonist’s fluid transition between the male and female genders — one that happened in the novel by magic rather than by medicine, for Woolf was writing two years before the first successful gender reassignment surgery was completed, decades before the term “transgender” was coined, and nearly half a century before Jan Morris’s trailblazing account of what it’s actually like to change bodily genders — Woolf considers the role of clothing as a vehicle of the transition and a signifier of the fluidity of identity:

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual — openness indeed was the soul of her nature — something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us… There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Curiously, Woolf herself was of questionable sartorial sensibility — so much so that even Vita noticed it from the midst of her infatuation, remarking on Virginia’s aesthetically atrocious choice of “woollen orange stockings [and] pumps.” But perhaps Woolf was simply more interested in the symbolic dimension of clothes than in the stylistic; more keen to explore that symbolism in her writing than in her wardrobe.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

With an eye to her protagonist’s fluid transition between the male and female genders — one that happened in the novel by magic rather than by medicine, for Woolf was writing two years before the first successful gender reassignment surgery was completed, decades before the term “transgender” was coined, and nearly half a century before Jan Morris’s trailblazing account of what it’s actually like to change bodily genders — Woolf considers the role of clothing as a vehicle of the transition and a signifier of the fluidity of identity:

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual — openness indeed was the soul of her nature — something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.